General aspects of effective field theories and few-body applications

Effective field theory provides a powerful framework to exploit a separation of scales in physical systems. In these lectures, we discuss some general aspects of effective field theories and their application to few-body physics. In particular, we consider an effective field theory for non-relativistic particles with resonant short-range interactions where certain parts of the interaction need to be treated nonperturbatively. As an application, we discuss the so-called pionless effective field theory for low-energy nuclear physics. The extension to include long-range interactions mediated by photon and pion-exchange is also addressed.